PENELOPE

PENELOPE

PENELOPE

Not that she was fooled by his disguise:
she’d have known him by his scars for sure,
by the way he cast his eye over the dead
and dying suitors. What was there to say?
Twenty years of waking dreams . . . now here he stood
in the light from the dying fire,
a greybeard dappled with gore. ‘Welcome,’ she said,
in a voice she barely knew, he barely recognised.

Her loom cast latticed shadows on the ceiling;
the grave-cloth she’d worked to destroy
hung on the frame like something flayed.
Shapes in the weave darkened to ash
and lifted off, black birds of night
low on the skyline and disappearing fast.